RCom to Allocate CDMA for Data Services and GSM For Voice Calling

Reliance Communications are in plans to migrate its voice oriented users to GSM networks. The telcom is looking to reserve CDMA spectrum mainly for providing wireless internet services. The move is to be made in order to increase revenues.

"The intent is to reduce dependence of pure play CDMA voice customers. The customers who don't use data, we will be migrating them to GSM spectrum and will free up spectrum for more and more data usage," said Reliance Communications CEO for wireless business, Gurdeep Singh.

"GSM and data (internet services) put together are driving our growth. GSM and data revenue now contribute 64 per cent to our wireless revenue, up from 57 per cent a year ago. We want to populate that network (CDMA) with dongles and CDMA smartphones," he said.

According to Mr Singh, this move will give the company a major growth opportunity in the CDMA quadrant. "other CDMA players reduce their footprint or have given up spectrum. We believe we have a strong opportunity to drive dominant position in a large screen format broadband access which is through dongles route and populate more phones of CDMA on to network", he said.

In order to promote it's CDMA services, Reliance has apparently tied up with Lenovo for CDMA smartphones and is said to be in talks with other vendors as well.

Reliance Communications said its non-voice services fetched around 21% of it's total revenue, with 29.4 million users using mobile internet, in march. Guess, the company want's to extend those numbers a bit.